


Insanity and Apathy

by melimarron



Category: The Reckoners - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: (kind of), Canon Compliant, Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Gen, POV Megan Tarash, POV Second Person, Unreliable Narrator, because she can ressurect, the character death is megan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:21:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27921433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melimarron/pseuds/melimarron
Summary: The human child Megan Tarash once was died in a fire. The Epic she came back as refused to be seen as lesser ever again.(Or, Megan's journey from a regular kid to Firefight.)
Relationships: David Charleston/Megan Tarash | Firefight, Megan Tarash | Firefight & Reckoners Team
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Insanity and Apathy

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. So, I haven't read the Reckoners series in a while, so this fic is a hodgepodge of what I could find on the Coppermind, what I could remember from the Reckoners series, and a couple headcanons of mine.  
> I hope you enjoy!

You don't realize anything’s wrong with you at first.

You just know that there’s too little oxygen and there’s smoke everywhere and you’re just barely escaping, crawling out of the house that your father had sworn was safe and would always be safe, forever and ever, with its bunker in the basement, all ready for nuclear war.

When you’d woken up to the screams of the fire alarms, you’d reacted before you could think. You’d jumped out of bed and grabbed your doll and your gun and ran for the door, but you couldn’t open it, and the room around you was getting hotter hotter hotter, until you nearly die from the smoke and the pain and and and and-

(There is a star rising in the sky, bright as the sun, and you are made up of millions, suddenly, millions of slightly different versions of _you_ that you will one day kill so that this version of you, this version of you who is destined to be great, will survive.)

When you wake up, you are in an ambulance, somehow unharmed, and the paramedics are soothing you. Memories come back to you in bits and pieces, and over the next few days you remember your father breaking your door down and scooping you up and running down the stairs, your sisters running after him, only for the flames to get too hot and too consuming and too dangerous, and you remember him burning. You remember your sisters burning. You remember everything _burning_.

You do not know how you have escaped.

You’re sent to a foster home once the hospital declares you uninjured. It’s the first of many, only notable because it was the first one. They send you away after you wake the whole house up one night too many, always screaming about the flames.

After that, the houses start to blur together. There’s the one with the woman whose face always looked like she’d bitten into a lemon when she looks at you, and there’s the one with the couple who whisper behind your back about how they’re only taking care of you for the money. In the end, they’re all interchangeable. You know you won’t stick around for longer than a few months, especially after you discover your powers, so you don’t bother being friendly. There’s no point, and why would you try to make friends with adults who would never understand the power bubbling in the world around you?

* * *

When you’re twelve, you die for the first time after some idiot at school boasts that he can survive alone in the woods way better than some stupid girl. It’s barely been a year since the fire, and you _know_ that some things are different about you now. Reality _fuzzes_ around you, and you get the impression that you might be able to tear it apart and glue it back together like a demented collage. 

You practice with your powers after school, and sometimes _during_ school, convincing teachers that you’ve completed assignments or aren’t sleeping at your desk, since there’s no point in slogging through school with all the imbeciles in your class. You’re better than them. You go to school to keep your foster parents happy, because on some level, you still want to keep them happy. Later, you plan to start ditching school entirely.

But when you’re twelve, you challenge this idiot boy to stay out in the woods for a full week in the dead of winter. You know you’ll survive; your father taught you well.

The idiot accepts, on the condition that you go with him, so that you can ensure that neither of you will go home as soon as night falls. But when it comes, night falls quickly, and with night there comes a fresh wave of snow, and while it might be so cold that you can’t feel your hands or feet, at least it isn’t _fire_.

You and the idiot are both too stubborn to concede, though, so you stay out there, you in your expertly built shelter, him in a leaky tent. But he has a fire, and you could not bring yourself to build one, so you freeze to death together. Maybe he isn’t the only idiot here.

When you wake up, you have a slightly different haircut and big gaps in your memory. You try not to think about it too much. It’s easy. Who cares about stupid children who froze to death? Who _cares?_

You don’t.

* * *

Portland crumbles away, destroyed by a group of Epics, less than a month after the idiot dies. You’re one of the only survivors, you think. There’s something right in that. You are superior. It is only natural that you have survived. You don’t think your foster parents survived, though. Unfortunate, but not unexpected.

You discover gaps in your memory again. There are more important things to do, though, and you ignore them, again.

* * *

When you’re thirteen, you discover Firefight for the first time. You’ve been roaming for a while, walking into town, taking food and clothes and guns as you need them, “disguised” with a scarf around your face. Sometimes they kill you, which is _annoying_ since you always forget what happened leading up to your death, so you can’t even get revenge properly. You start carrying around a video recorder, so you can start getting revenge.

You discover Firefight when a man points a gun at you and, tired of dying and rewatching footage so you can locate the town you died in and kill everyone in it, you search your arsenal of realities for the scariest image you can find.

It’s scary, all right.

You’re _terrified_ of Firefight at first, more scared than you’ve ever been since your house burned down. It’s strange: this terror might be the most real thing you’ve felt since you were _normal_. You _know_ that he’s just an illusion, and you _know_ that you’re invincible, but you’re paralyzed with fear as the two of you look at each other- him with curiosity, you because you can’t physically move, either to shoot him or to run away.

At least he scared the man with the gun and his posse away, too.

* * *

When you’re fourteen, you summon Firefight again. He’ll be a good cover- a perfect cover. With him as your mask, who would think to attack you with fire?

The only issue is that he’s, well, an _illusion_. Anyone with bravery (or perhaps invincibility) would easily figure that out, and then you’re toast. Maybe literally.

As long as you avoid invincible Epics, you should be fine. Normal people wouldn’t figure it out- they’d be too busy cowering. If you’re careful, you’ll be fine.

* * *

When you’re seventeen, you meet Steelheart for the first time.

He’s famous- the invincible, untouchable man who can turn anything not living into steel. He’s terrifying for those same reasons.

You walk into Newcago, fully intending on just passing through. You still have _some_ self-preservation instincts left. You’re not going to try to camp out in another Epic’s territory, _especially_ not one who might figure out your secret.

Steelheart finds you anyway.

You’re brought to his palace, babbling excuses the whole way through. You were just passing through, you know that this is his territory, you aren’t here to challenge him.

But he _knows_ , somehow, that you and Firefight are one and the same, and rather than killing you, he stares you down, nothing but coldness in his dead eyes, and offers you a job as a part of his inner circle.

You’re tired of wandering. Of having to kill and be killed in order to maintain your place in the natural order of things. Even if Steelheart does kill you, there’s no guarantee it will stick. Nobody else knows about your reincarnation, even if he has figured out Firefight. Besides, with him as your employer, nobody would dare stand against you.

So you accept.

* * *

When you’re eighteen, Steelheart tells you to go undercover with a Reckoners cell led by Jonathan Phaedrus himself. Your job is to get to know them, to understand them, then carefully guide them to Newcago so that Steelheart can take down the leader of the Reckoners once and for all.

It’s a good plan, you think. You just need to bring Jonathan Phaedrus to Newcago, and from there, nothing can go wrong. The hardest part of this plan will be gaining the Reckoners’ trust.

When you start out, you have to control yourself. You can’t fly into your usual rages whenever the team irritates you, when they make stupid calls or make stupid jokes about _Scotland_. You have to stay calm. You have to pretend to be lesser, to be _human_.

And then you start _doing_ things, _feeling_ things that you haven’t felt in a long time. Words like _empathy_ and _compassion_ and _friendship_ settle into your mind, and you try to reject them as hard as you can. Even before your powers, you never held much regard for empathy and compassion.

Still, you grab a six pack of Coke for Tia when you raid an abandoned grocery store, and you tentatively start joking with Cody about his tall tales about Scotland, and you talk guns with Abraham. You can’t quite get a handle on Prof, but that’s fine; you’ll figure him out later.

The longer you stay, the easier it is to control yourself.

The longer you stay, the more you can feel your old self, your _human_ self returning, overwriting your Epic instincts.

The longer you stay, the less you want to leave.

But you have a job to do.

So you carefully poke and prod them towards Newcago, and their deaths.

* * *

You meet David Charleston when you’re nineteen, and maybe you have slowly become more human with Tia and Cody and Abraham and Prof, but David is where it all comes crashing down. You start to care more. You start to laugh more freely and sometimes you can go days without feeling that itch to use your powers unless you or one of the Reckoners are in danger.

Then it all ends, because you die, and David Charleston, stupid slontze, stupid _Knees_ , has to ruin it all by refusing to let you die alone.

You die infiltrating Steelheart’s castle, and you wake up to a video of a boy trying his best to save you. He’s a Reckoner, an enemy, someone who has figured out that Firefight is nothing but smoke and mirrors, someone who has devoted his life to killing the most powerful Epic you know.

You have to wonder if he would have tried to save you if he knew who you really were.

* * *

When you’re nineteen, you run into a burning building to save David, because even though David’s a stupid slontze with too much idealism for his own good, you don’t want him to die. You think you might love him- or, if nothing else, you _like_ him. You have more positive feelings towards him than you’ve had for anyone since you were eleven years old and crawled out of a burning building that your father, for all his preparations, never prepared for. Somehow, David doesn’t annoy you quite as much as everyone else does.

When you’re nineteen, you nearly burn to death, and all you can feel is terror, a bone-deep terror that rips away every pretense of being better than other people. You are just as mortal as they, even if you can resurrect, and you do not know if you’ll come back from this fiery death.

But if you can save David, then you don’t mind dying.

Still, you’re not a complete idiot, so you check the building- he’s not there, of course he isn’t, of course Prof lied to you, you’re a traitor and insane and a monster- and then shoot yourself in the head. You _know_ fire negates your powers; there’s no way in hell you’re going to let yourself burn.

* * *

You wake up on top of a building, just in time to realize that Prof has finally succumbed to the combination of insanity and apathy that all Epics suffer from. 

You wake up on top of a building, and you do not want to kill David, and the thought of fire no longer paralyzes you with fear and dread.

You wake up on top of a building. Your name is Megan. Prof has finally fallen to the madness, and you do not want to kill David.

There is more, of course, and all that will need to be sorted out later, like the people you killed and the lives you ruined and Mizzy Williams, who stares at you with the same righteous hatred in her eyes that David once held for Steelheart. Prof has become the Epic he was meant to be, drowning under the weight of his powers and drunk on those powers at the same time, completely unable to comprehend that others live, and dream, and hope.

You know what that weight feels like, and what that drunkenness feels like. You’ve just woken up from it, and you don’t know how long you’ve got before the fiery nightmares pull you back again.

But you did not burn, and you don’t want to kill David, and right now, that’s enough.

**Author's Note:**

> What did you think? :)


End file.
